Wednesday, January 15, 2014

“Pizzagate According to Me”

by Jerry Krase

Like
the original “Fill-in-the-Blank-Scandal-Gate,” for me at least, Pizzagate
started small; as a ripple on Facebook
as I visited my fbf (Facebook Friend)
Diane Savino’s page and watched a video of Bill De Blasio’s commensal visit to
Goodfella’s Pizza. It had a link to the Staten
Island Advance’s coverage of the (for SI at least) momentous occasion. From there I was carried adrift by that
swelling wave swamped all New York Dailies,
New York Magazine, Huffington Post, The Daily Show, and the Entire
Blogoshere. Then it crossed the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to
crash upon the shores of La Bell’Italia
where it soaked the pages of La Stampa
and La Repubblica until the backwash of
righteously bogus indignation finally seeped into Maureen Dowd’s “Tynes that
Tempt Men’s Souls”.

Some
of my more intellectual Facebook friends responded to the New York press corps’
waste of valuable public space by lamenting the absence of actually informed
sources such as Murray Kempton. Being less cerebral, I wondered how Wayne
Barrett, Jimmy Breslin or even Woodward and Bernstein would have dealt with the
story. To the Italian and other foreign media that monolinguals ignore, the American
press doesn’t know anything about pizza or Italy. Italians have always railed
against the uninformedly biased coverage of cose
italiane but for them this was the last dirty dish.

I’m
sure Jimmy Breslin would have compared Blazin Billy’s culinary predelictions to
those of Un Occhio, or perhaps, in regard
to his upscale dinner table affections, to Society Carey. Wayne Barrett, I am
certain, would have penned a thousand-word digression into the loss of the
cutlery industry in The Big Apple. To mimic Woodward and Bernstein: “One of the
eight men (+ two women) secretly videographed Friday evening in the attempt to
consume several pizzas and related antipasti at Goodfella’s in Staten Island
last week is the recently elected Mayor of the City of New York, Bill De
Blasio. The suspect, aka Wilhelm Warren Jr., 53, also shovels his own sidewalk
after significant snowfalls, NYC OEM Commissioner Joe Bruno said yesterday… In
a statement issued by Mario Batali, De Blasio and the others caught on camera
at the pizza venue “were not operating either in my behalf or with my consent”
in the alleged partaking.Not
eating pizza the way real new Yorkers do was probably due to his Boston roots.

In
my opinion, Pizzagate and the explosion of copious copy reflecting having too
much time on one’s hands, or better things to do, is explained by the sudden
appearance of a (for now) too-accessible Mayor. It was difficult for City Hall
reporters to look over Bloomberg’s shoulder as he dined during one of his top-secret
weekend excursions to the other outer island of New York City –Bermuda, where Michael
Barbaro once caught him “At
Greg’s Steakhouse, the power lunch spot on this sun-soaked island,” at which
Himself “…is such a regular that he has his own booth, with a view of the
Parliament building. The waiters have memorized his order: coffee-rubbed New
York strip steak.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/nyregion/26bermuda.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

The
rapidity at which “the how not to eat pizza in front of reporters who don’t
know any better” story went viral, is more unfortunate proof of the decreasing
distance between the deservedly maligned twittering/tweeting, Blogosphere and
the allegedly Legitimate Press. As to other things that might concern reporters
about Staten Island, first on my list would be the past, present, and future neglected
scandals over the lack of attention to the plight of residents and businesses
in Richmond County’s enormous littoral zone where they never should have been
found, where they were swamped by Sandy, and where they wait righteously
impatiently for promised relief by Federal, State, and Municipal authorities.
Another good story might be the wages of fast food workers and the regressively
super abundance of Lhota voters there. In the meanwhile, I await the outrage by
those sharing Wilhelm’s Teutonic roots over Blazin’ Bill’s uncoerced confession
about pouring beer over ice cubes.

For
an Italian view of 'Pizza-gate' per De
Blasio, la mangia con le posate